


Can't Let Her Go

by unlmtdsky



Category: Mass Effect Trilogy
Genre: Angst, F/M, Grief/Mourning, Heads up I cried while writing this, Loss, Love, Masturbation, Memories, POV Kaidan Alenko, Sex, major character death (referenced), post-Alchera, survivor's guilt
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-15
Updated: 2021-03-15
Packaged: 2021-03-23 00:20:15
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,919
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/30047013
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/unlmtdsky/pseuds/unlmtdsky
Summary: Kaidan’s life changes forever the day the Normandy is destroyed and Shepard is killed.He finds himself alone, struggling to pick up the pieces in the wake of her death.He wants to be able to move on with his life, but he can’t move on from what happened.He can't move on from her.Why can’t he let her go?
Relationships: Kaidan Alenko/Female Shepard
Comments: 5
Kudos: 5





	Can't Let Her Go

**Author's Note:**

> A/N: I haven’t ever written anything quite like this before, but I wanted to try something different now that it’s been about a year since I first started playing the trilogy. I’m not quite sure this has turned out the way I’d been imagining it in my mind and I'm honestly terrified about posting it, but if I don’t just get brave and let it go and post it at some point, I’ll never stop revising it. So here it is.
> 
> CW: Oh, a quick note. If you’re looking at the explicit tags on this piece and hoping to read about some sexy times between Kaidan and Shepard... Well, this story isn’t really about that, although there is a bit of a memory of that in there. Heed those loss, survivor's guilt, and grief tags -- they are definitely there for a reason.

Sometimes it’s a flash of crimson that catches his eye and starts his heart pounding in his chest. He’ll turn, only to find himself staring longingly after a stranger. Maybe the hair color will be just right, but nothing else is: wrong height, wrong clothes, wrong eyes, wrong everything.

Every female soldier wearing an officer’s uniform draws a second glance—just to assure himself that it isn’t her, that she hasn’t just cut her hair and changed the color and gone on living a life without him.

He knows that’s not possible, but he always looks anyway.

Every once in a while, he hears someone say the name Jane, and he stops whatever he’s doing to make sure it’s not _his_ Jane they’re talking to. 

He knows this doesn’t make any sense, because no one who ever saw Commander Shepard would call out the name Jane to get her attention. He can’t even remember ever hearing anyone call her by her first name except for him, so he’s not sure why hearing the name Jane affects him like that. But it gets him every single time. What if the one time he doesn’t check, it’s actually her?

It _can’t_ be her—he knows it can’t. But it doesn’t matter. What if _this_ time it is?

So he always checks.

Then one day he hears a familiar voice while he’s walking down a crowded corridor in Zakera Ward. He’s so certain it’s her that it freezes him in his tracks, his head swiveling wildly as he desperately searches for the source. He barely notices when a turian who had been following too closely curses dramatically as he has to swerve around him to avoid a collision. Finally, he spots a vidscreen on a far wall playing a clip of an old interview Shepard had given just after the Battle of the Citadel.

Despair pours into the void left behind when his fleeting hope of having finally found her evaporates, but even still, he’s drawn inexorably towards the image of her on the screen. He stares at it for a few minutes, entranced, completely oblivious to the bustling crowd going about their lives just behind him, just as they’re oblivious to the grief he is carrying around with him everywhere. He watches the entire interview until the news report moves on to another story, something about a recent drop in crime rates on Omega.

For a few minutes, though, it’s almost like Shepard isn’t really gone. Because there she is wearing her Alliance navy blues, her red hair hanging in a neat bob that frames her face prettily and those disarming green eyes of hers fixed on the reporter. This time it _is_ the right clothes, right hair color, right haircut, right eyes, right everything.

This is exactly how he remembers her, commanding and captivating and beautiful even though all she’s doing is talking and smiling and brushing off a compliment from the interviewer with a laugh in that way she does when she wants to deflect positive attention from herself.

When Shepard suddenly turns and looks directly at the camera, it’s like she’s looking directly at him. _Into_ him. It makes his heart ache, and he just barely stops himself from reaching out and pressing his fingertips to the screen.

He knows the interview is months old—he’s even seen it before—but he tries to convince himself it’s live because he wants to convince himself that _she’s_ alive, even if only for a few minutes.

But he knows it’s not.

And he knows that she’s not.

And when the interview ends, it’s all he can do to force himself back into the bustling crowd to go about the rest of his day. He’s still oblivious to the crowd, and they’re still oblivious to him.

He doesn’t know how much more of this he can take, how much more of this he can put himself through. He had thought that perhaps over time things would fade. Maybe things would become a little easier. Maybe he’d stop trying to look for her everywhere.

But he can’t stop.

Even though he _knows_ she’s gone. And, fuck, does he ever know it.

He needs to let her go. She’s not coming back.

Why does it still hurt so fucking much every time he’s reminded of her?

He knows why.

When Anderson approaches him with an opportunity to head to Earth for a promotion leading a new biotics division within Spec Ops, he is reluctant at first but eventually accepts.

He doesn’t really want to leave the one place remaining where he and Shepard spent time together. With the Normandy gone, the Citadel is all he has left. But maybe if he can get away to someplace Shepard’s never been, he can finally be free of her. He doesn’t really _want_ to be free of her, but he doesn’t know what else to do. He can’t keep living like this indefinitely.

Can he?

Why can’t he just let her go?

*****

A few months later, he’s still trying to settle into his new routine and his new life away from everything that reminded him of Shepard.

He still looks for her sometimes. He looks for flashes of red hair and he listens for whispers of her name, but it happens a little less often than before. She’s never been here, so there’s nothing here that is tied to her. No familiar locations to trigger specific memories of her. No mutual acquaintances that might bring her up unexpectedly or remind him of her.

The biggest change is that now, instead of recognizing things in his surroundings that remind him of her, his mind just has to create its own reasons to conjure her.

He starts to dream about Shepard constantly. He dreams of their old Normandy missions, of chasing down Saren together. Eden Prime. Feros. Virmire. Ilos. He dreams of the day she’d been made a Spectre. He dreams of the day they'd defeated Saren. And he dreams of the exact moment he’d realized she was still alive after they'd nearly been crushed by Sovereign’s wreckage in the Council Chambers. For a minute, he’d thought she hadn’t made it, and he’d give _anything_ to get to again experience the relief and joy he'd felt that day at discovering she’d survived her brush with death.

He relives these moments in his dreams and then wakes up feeling as if they’d happened only yesterday, half-expecting to find himself in the crew quarters on the Normandy. One morning, he’s so wrapped up in one of these dreams that he’s actually confused at not having woken up in his old bunk and it takes him a minute to realize where he is and when he is. Grief hits him hard when he does come back to reality.

He considers taking sleeping pills or just trying anything that might help him to have dreamless nights, but then he’d miss out on some of the other dreams he has of her, and he doesn’t want to miss out on those.

Because he dreams of the more intimate moments between them too, all those moments when he’d felt himself falling for her. He dreams of the thrill of getting to navigate the surface of an uncharted world by her side. Of laughing with the rest of the crew while eating dinner in the Normandy's mess. He wasn't quite sure if she'd ever noticed, but he could never keep his eyes off her during those little moments between missions. She was so beautiful when she laughed; he wished she'd had the opportunity to do it more often. He dreams of their talks after missions. He'd spend hours tinkering with that stupid console outside of her quarters just hoping for a chance to speak with her. He dreams of the time she laid a comforting hand on his arm after he’d bared his soul and told her about what happened at BAaT with Vyrnnus and Rahna. And he dreams of the first time he’d nearly kissed Shepard, right before they’d stolen the Normandy.

A part of him knows he shouldn’t be dreaming of her so often—it’s the opposite of what he was hoping would happen when he accepted this new position. But he has no control over his subconscious while he sleeps. And truthfully, he’s a little worried that if he stops dreaming of her now, he’ll start to forget her entirely.

And while he wants to be able to let her go, he’s also afraid of what will happen when he does. If he ever does.

It turns out he is far more suited to teaching than he thought he would be. His students are wonderful: young, talented cadets who grew up without as much of the stigma that was around biotics when he was younger and who never had to go to places like BAaT. They’re eager to train with him, and they help him keep his mind on work instead of other things.

When he’s around them, though, he can’t help but think back to when he was their age and about what a messed up kid he was. Then he wonders what Shepard was like when she was that age, before she became the Hero of Elysium and a famous N7 Commander, before she became the woman he’d come to know and love. He knows a bit about what happened to her family on Mindoir but he knows nothing about how she discovered her biotics or about her experiences as a young soldier or in ICT. They’d never gotten around to those conversations. 

There were so many little things he never got to know about her, never got to ask her.

They’d simply run out of time.

He knows his parents are worried about him. His father worries for his career; his mother worries for his well-being. They just want him to be happy, she tells him. He promises them that he’s trying, and since he doesn’t like lying to his mother, he starts to try.

He forces himself to socialize, to meet new people. This has always been something he’s found difficult, but he forces himself to do it anyway. He tells himself it’s what Shepard would want for him, too.

One night, he lets a group of younger officers convince him to go out to a bar with them. They drink and talk and laugh, the younger men carefree in a way he doesn’t ever remember being, even back in his early days in the Alliance. He tries to laugh it off when they tease him for still being a bachelor.

_“How long have you been stationed here now, Commander Alenko? You should let us set you up with someone.”_

One of the hardest things about losing Shepard has been pretending like losing her is less than what it was. To the Alliance, to his family, and to the world—he lost his commanding officer when the Normandy went down. But on the inside, he’s never stopped mourning the loss of the love of his life. And he has no one he can talk to about it.

He might have talked to some of the original Normandy crew—who is he kidding, he probably wouldn’t breathe a word of his relationship with Shepard to any of them, not without discussing it with her first—but it doesn’t matter because everyone who is still alive has scattered to the winds anyway. 

Liara, Tali, and Wrex disappeared from the Citadel shortly after Shepard’s funeral. Garrus, not long after that. Joker—well, he and Joker had been good friends once, but he has a hard time looking the pilot in the eye these days. They haven’t communicated in months. As for Dr. Chakwas… she’d probably have the best understanding of what he’s going through, but he heard she was transferred to a facility on Mars a while back.

So he carries on suffering alone. And he sees only loneliness in his future.

He hasn’t been with anyone since Shepard, and he’d be lying if he said he wasn’t lonely sometimes.

Still, he only has to think about their offer to set him up with someone for a second before he turns them down.

A few nights later, he’s suddenly missing Shepard so goddamn much, missing the companionship and intimacy he had with her, that he decides he’s going to try to masturbate for the first time since… well, since losing her. He knows it’s probably not a good idea, but he just wants to feel something. It's been so long since he's felt anything.

His bedroom is dark, and he settles onto his bed, trying to calm his racing heart, which has begun pounding in his chest for some reason he can’t quite interpret. Reclining against his headboard, he dips a hand into his boxers and works himself free, wrapping his fingers around his shaft.

He closes his eyes and thinks of her. It feels sort of wrong to think of her for this reason, but he doesn’t want to think of anyone else either.

So he thinks back to the last time they were together. It’s been so long since he’s allowed himself to think of Shepard this way that the memories are slow to form, faded and gauzy.

He starts by remembering the soft sighs she made when he kissed her, sliding a hand underneath her shirt to cup her breast. He remembers the way her back arched when he trailed kisses down the pale, soft skin of her stomach and when he dipped his tongue in her navel. He still remembers how she tastes and the way she would buck her hips as he lapped at her. And how eventually, when he found just the right spot, Shepard’s biotics flickered, calling out to his own.

Shepard was always calling out to him. Even now.

As he remembers, he begins to move slowly, gripping himself, trying to imagine it’s her hand wrapped around his cock instead of his own. He can’t quite complete the illusion, though, his thicker, calloused fingers so clearly different from her own more slender and gentler ones.

He squeezes his eyes shut, trying to conjure more details from the last time they’d made love. The image of her lying gloriously naked beneath him on their bed sends a jolt of pleasure to his groin. Her freckled cheeks flushed pink, emerald eyes gone dark beneath thick lashes, and scarlet hair splayed out like a halo of fire against her white linen pillow. He can clearly picture the blissful look on her face the moment he’d entered her. He can hear the sounds she’d made, soft whimpers and moans against his lips as he’d slowly kissed her, fucked her.

She’d claimed control then, wrapping her legs around his waist and flipping them over so that she is straddling him. Against his closed eyelids, he sees her smoldering gaze looking down at him, a mischievous smile playing on her lips as she reaches between them before lowering herself onto him.

He grunts at that part of the memory, leaning his head back against the wall and giving his half-hard cock a squeeze as he tries to remember exactly what it feels like to be sheathed inside of her.

As she starts to ride him, chasing her pleasure in his memory, he tries to find his own in the present. She picks up her pace and so does he, the sensual gyrations of her hips working in tandem with the movements of his own hand. The sounds of her labored breathing fills his ears, driving him on.

But then, suddenly, everything shifts.

Her panting turns to gasping, the sound now harsh in his ear rather than erotic. She can’t breathe. She’s gasping for air, and he can tell that panic is setting in. Her breathing accelerates and shallows, and he thinks he can pinpoint the exact moment she realizes she’s going to die. And there’s nothing he can do to stop it.

He immediately releases himself, his hands flying up to cover his mouth and failing to contain the sob that racks through him.

Now he’s squeezing his eyes shut to keep the memories out instead of in, to try and stem the flood of tears that are threatening. But he fails. He can’t stop the tears from streaming down his face.

He gives in to his grief, slumping over until he’s laying on his side. He’s shaking, taking shuddering breaths as he tries to regain control of himself. He cries until there aren’t any tears left. He hasn’t let himself cry like that since the day of her funeral. He doesn’t want to stop thinking of her, but he at least has to stop thinking of her like _this_.

This memory of her, his last memory of her, he wishes he _could_ forget.

But he can’t let it go, and she won’t let go of him either. He doesn’t know if he wants her to.

He doesn’t know what he wants.

He just knows that thinking of her always brings him pain, and thinking about how he lost her hurts even more. Because it’s his fault she’s gone.

*****

It’s on the one year anniversary of the Normandy’s destruction that he finally really does see her.

From the moment he wakes up, he knows that it’s going to be a bad day. He immediately regrets not anticipating it and taking the day off, but he hates to be a burden on others, so he refuses to call in sick for this. He’ll just suffer silently through today like he does every other.

He tries to lose himself in routine. He makes his bed. He takes a shower. He shaves. He dresses. Every movement, every action is rote, done mechanically and without thought. He’ll consider it a blessing if he can just make it through the whole day without having to think.

When he’s ready for work, he heads into his kitchen to prepare his breakfast. And that’s where he finds Shepard.

She’s sitting at his breakfast bar, wearing one of his old t-shirts and drinking a cup of coffee, looking for all the world like it’s completely normal for her to be there. He freezes in the doorway, unsure of what's happening at first. His honey brown eyes meet her emerald green ones as she calmly sips from a navy mug with a white Alliance logo that he recognizes from his cabinet.

It’s a glimpse into a sort of domestic future they never really dared to dream about: sharing an apartment, spending their nights in each other’s arms and their mornings talking companionably over cups of coffee before work. She’s a vision in his t-shirt, too, looking both casual and sexy, and he wishes he could tell if she was wearing _only_ his shirt. Can this be real?

He knows that it's not, knows that Shepard’s not really sitting here in his kitchen and drinking his coffee out of his favorite mug while wearing his old t-shirt. A quick glance at the coffee pot confirms that it hasn’t been touched. And he’s pretty sure that particular shirt is folded up and stuffed in a bottom drawer.

He doesn’t know how her ghost knew to find him here or why, today of all days. She’s never been in this apartment. Never sat at this counter. Never had coffee out of that mug. Never even seen that t-shirt. But this _feels_ real, and he wants _her_ to be real, so he lets the scene play out.

“Shepard?”

Her name is barely a whisper on his lips, but it’s loud enough for her to hear it, if she’s really here.

She doesn’t speak, just sets down her mug— _his_ mug, he corrects himself—and smiles softly at him.

His breath catches. She’s so beautiful, exactly as he remembers her. He’s afraid to look away again, afraid to move, terrified of breaking whatever spell has brought her to him this morning, so he remains frozen in the doorway. A long moment of silence hangs heavy in the air.

“Hi, Shepard,” he says finally. “I—I miss you.”

Her smile fades, and her expression turns sad. His heart lurches in his chest, a pang of sorrow gripping him.

This is his chance. They didn’t have time to say a proper goodbye before, on the Normandy. Everything had happened so quickly.

He doesn’t know how much time he has, but she’s here right now and he can tell her all of the things he’s been holding inside all this time. What should he say to her?

That he still loves her? That he thinks about her every day?

That he’s felt empty inside ever since her death and he doesn’t know how to fill the hollowness she left behind?

Should he tell her that he’s been lost without her? That he needs her? That he’s been a ghost without her?

These are the things he _wants_ to say, but they aren’t really what he _needs_ to say, now that she’s finally here. If this is his only chance to talk to her, he knows what he has to say.

He looks down at the floor, gaze suddenly fixated on a scuff on his kitchen tiles. He can’t look her in the eyes when he says this, what he’s been needing to tell her for a year now.

“Jane, I am so, so sorry.”

He is filled with the sudden need to confess everything he's been holding inside since her death. He needs to tell her that he never should have let her go after Joker. He never should have gotten into an escape pod without her. He shouldn’t have let her order him to leave her. If there was one fucking order he should have disobeyed in his entire life, it was that one. He’ll regret it to his dying day.

It should have been him who died, not her. He’ll never understand why he survived and she didn’t.

The galaxy doesn’t _need_ Kaidan Alenko, but it does need Commander Shepard. He needs her, too, except she left him behind without even saying goodbye. But he doesn’t blame _her_ for leaving. He blames himself.

He knows that the reason he’s never been able to let her go is because if she’s not really gone, then that means he’d have her back and there’d be nothing to blame himself for.

But she _is_ gone.

So he’ll never have her back. And he’ll never be able to stop blaming himself for being the reason she's gone.

When he raises his head to speak to her again, to try to explain himself and apologize again, the seat at the breakfast bar is empty and there’s no sign of the coffee mug she’d been drinking from. She’s just gone, like she was never there at all.

“Shepard, wait!”

He takes a single frantic step forward when he sees she’s no longer there. But of course she’s not there. She never was. She was never in this apartment. She was never sitting in his kitchen or wearing his shirt or drinking out of his mug. It had felt real, but it wasn’t, no matter how much he wanted it to be.

He spends the rest of the day looking for her everywhere, but he doesn’t see her again. Their ‘encounter’ this morning bothers him all day. It left him feeling unmoored, like things are desperately unresolved between them—even more so than they already had been, given how things had ended for them. Well, ended for her. He's never really been able to find any sense of closure after her death.

He’s not operating at even half capacity at work, but pretty much everyone in the galaxy knows what day it is so they cut him some slack and just give him space. He’s grateful no one brings it up; he's in such a precarious mental state today that he doesn’t know whether he’d be able to stop himself from lashing out at the first person to mention Shepard’s name to him.

After he leaves work, he decides to take a much longer route home than usual, avoiding his apartment as long as he can. He even considers staying in a hotel tonight, but he knows he's being ridiculous. It's just that he’s not sure if he wants Shepard to be waiting for him when he gets home or not. In the end, it doesn’t matter what he wants; when he gets home, the apartment is empty.

Just like this morning, he moves mechanically through his evening routine. He eventually collapses in bed, mentally drained. He doesn't know whether he wants to fall asleep or not. He’s exhausted, but he knows that he’s likely to dream of Shepard, and that might not be a good thing today.

He rolls over onto his back and stares up at his dark ceiling, thinking back to this morning. It occurs to him that what’s been bothering him all day isn’t that Shepard didn’t reply when he spoke to her. It’s that the thing that seemed to cause her to disappear was his apology.

He considers the implications.

Shepard is dead—what use does she have for an apology now? It won't bring her back. And feeling guilty won't bring her back either.

What had he been expecting from her really... Forgiveness? Absolution?

If that’s what he's been waiting for all this time, then he's a lost cause because he is going to be waiting forever. Without Shepard around, the only one who can grant him those things is himself.

He pauses, then finally considers that it isn't really Shepard's forgiveness that he needs.

He can’t let Shepard go, but maybe he doesn’t have to, not entirely. He just needs to learn to live with being alive without her. He needs to say goodbye. And maybe that can be enough. It'll have to be enough.

Out of the corner of his eye, a sudden movement from across the room catches his attention. He turns his head to the side, and in the darkness, he sees a figure standing in the doorway. The presence doesn't even startle him because this time he's expecting it. A woman, tall and slender and clad in only a familiar t-shirt, her long, muscular legs bare below the hem of the shirt just as he'd allowed himself to imagine earlier. _Shepard_.

He shifts onto his side, trying to see her a little more clearly, and this time, she speaks to him first.

“Hey, Kaidan,” she says. Her voice is low, huskier than it usually is when she talks. He recognizes it as her bedroom voice, and it sets his heart pounding in his chest.

“Hi, Jane.”

She doesn’t say anything more, instead crossing her arms and leaning her shoulder against the doorframe. It’s a clear invitation. She’s not here to talk; she’s come back to listen to whatever else he needs to say to her.

He doesn’t look away from her this time, forcing himself to meet her eyes, two specks of light in the darkness. He wishes he could see her face more clearly, but in the dark all he can really make out are shadows.

He's about to launch into an apology again, but he stops himself. Instead of apologizing, he decides to tell her what he should have said to her when he'd had the chance.

"I wish we could have had more time, Jane. There's so much we never to got to do, so much we never got to say to each other."

He's not really sure why he's saying all of this out loud. He knows Shepard's not really here, that he's actually speaking to an empty room. But saying the words out loud is helping.

"You changed my life, you know that? You're the best thing that ever happened to me. No one else will measure up to you."

She doesn't say anything, just looks back at him from across the room. He presses on.

"The galaxy is an emptier place without you in it—my life is emptier without you in it. You are the love of my life, Jane." He takes in a deep breath and lets it out slowly before continuing. "And I just need you to know that whatever else happens, that will never stop being true, okay?"

Shepard shifts then, straightening and dropping her arms to her sides.

“I really do miss you,” he whispers.

“I know,” she replies quietly. His breath catches.

“And I love you.”

“I know.”

He can’t see her face clearly in the darkness, but he imagines that she’s giving him that sad smile again now. 

“Goodbye, Jane.”

“Goodbye, Kaidan.”

His next breath is a sob, and he reaches up a hand to wipe away the tears that have spilled down his cheeks. When he looks back over across the room, Shepard is gone. But instead of feeling panic like he did after her disappearance this morning, he feels a strange sense of peace settling over him. He hasn't felt anything like it in a year.

There’s still an ache in his chest, a sorrow in his heart that he doesn’t think will ever leave, but for tonight, at least, it eases just a little.

He probably won’t ever let her go entirely. But he can try to find a way to live with the memory of her. For now, it'll have to be enough.


End file.
